Callil has 'Faith' in book's details

Reporter: MAXINE MCKEW

MAXINE McKEW: Well, the author of this new history is better known as a publisher. Carmen Callil was born in Melbourne, but has spent most of her adult life in the United Kingdom. She founded the Virago Press in 1972 and helped promote the work of writers such AS Byatt, Edward Said, Iris Murdoch, Antonia White and many others. But tonight it's time to talk about her own work. Carmen Callil, welcome to Lateline.

CARMEN CALLIL, AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER: Thank you.

MAXINE McKEW: Let's start by picking up some of the points there that you've just heard in that introductory tape. First is the question of Myrtle and it's almost as if you've written about one person, but the Jones family talk about an entirely different character, don't they? Certainly in terms of the question of Myrtle's political belief, is the Jones family on firm ground when they say she was virtually apolitical?

CARMEN CALLIL: I think she was apolitical, but they're not on firm ground about her understanding of what her husband did. She lived with him throughout the war and all throughout her life, Myrtle was a fantasiser. In Madrid after the war - I met many people who knew her - and she was always talking about the children she'd saved by bringing them over the Pyrenees. Well, Myrtle at that point was a very large woman because the alcohol had made her very, very large indeed. And she was considered as a piteous figure, always talking about these children she saved and always fabricating imaginary events. You see, she called herself a baroness, as Louis did, and his name was not Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, his name was Louis Darquier. From the very beginning, Myrtle had changed her name. When she married for first time, she called herself Sandra Lindsay and she changed the name of her father on the marriage certificate at Sydney registry office. So Myrtle always ... Myrtle had charm, so it would be unfair to say she was a terrible liar in a condemnatory way, but she was a formidable liar. I mean, not a word of truth passed her lips - as her daughter, I'm afraid, knew all too well.

MAXINE McKEW: Equally, there's a very different view presented of Louis by Heather Jones, as we've heard there, almost as someone who basically could do no other than he did, simply following orders?

CARMEN CALLIL: It's undeniable. You don't even have to come to my house in London to see 1 million papers that I've got - the papers are in every single library throughout the world. They would be in the Mitchell Library, they're on the web. Let's just take one example - on July 16, he was in charge of the first large round-up of Jews in Paris. It was called the Rafle du Vel'd'Hiv. They rounded up 13 Jews. Over a third of those were children, little children. These children went to Auschwitz, nearly 4,000 of them, unaccompanied by their parents in the most case, unaccompanied by even their little brothers and sisters, if they had them, and all of them died. Now, I haven't made that up. And the murder of children seems to me as something that should reach the Jones family, even if they don't accept the rest of the Holocaust. And the second thing to be said is I don't think Louis - Louis considered Germans to be barbarians, he took their money but he considered himself to be a French national socialist, a French patriot. He was a French anti-Semite. He constantly reiterated this point. The Germans had no influence on him, he would say. This was not the truth, but the Vichy France had its own anti-Semitic agenda and to blame it always on the Germans is not acceptable, historically.

MAXINE McKEW: I just want to check there - I think you might have said 13 children. Did you mean 13,000 French Jewish children?

CARMEN CALLIL: I meant 13,000. It was 13,000 people approximately - men, women and children. But over a third of those were children, of the 13,000. Over 4,000 children were arrested on July 16 and 17, 1942 and none of them survived.

MAXINE McKEW: In fact, this is the most poignant and wretched section of your book where you describe these events of July 1942. But there is no doubt about the central role that Louis Darquier played in this because, after all, you also describe someone who was anything but a model of the efficient Prussian bureaucrat, if you like. He was pretty hopeless, wasn't he?

CARMEN CALLIL: (Laughs) He was actually a French bounder and conman. And what has to be said is that both the Germans and the Vichy French came to hate him because he loathed to work. Basically he took money from other people, and he was so inefficient that the only round-up he was permitted to do was the one I have described to you. After that, he spent most of his period as commissioner of Jewish affairs attending to getting money from Jews and taking their property. And this is also described in my book. The death of the Jews was only a part of what he did.

MAXINE McKEW: There's also a bizarre association, isn't there - there's this awful destructive co-dependency you describe between Myrtle and Louis, but equally, there's this paradox - that at the same time that Louis is commissioner for Jewish affairs, you document that Myrtle is an Anglophile, she's sitting there in Paris really cheering on for Great Britain to win the war.

CARMEN CALLIL: Well, I think that's true. I think that's what she said. But in the accounts which are in my book you will see that quite often she's the worse for wear. I know the family don't like to think she was an alcoholic but Anne's half-sister, whom I've met many times, described all too well. She was seen, for example - towards the end of her life, in the fact that they lived in Madrid, across the road was a bottle shop and in the bottle shop she is still remembered. And she used to be found wandering in the streets the worse for wear. I don't know how much more proof I have to find to demonstrate that she was an alcoholic. So I don't think they took her seriously. Actually, the women Vichy, the wives did object to her. She wasn't what they expected in the wife of a commissioner and when she had too much drink taken, she was loud mouthed. But certainly she knew what was going on. She did. But she fantasised and she drank to prevent having to acknowledge what she was doing.

MAXINE McKEW: Was she an embarrassment to Louis? And indeed, what kept them together?

CARMEN CALLIL: I think they were absolutely dependent one upon the other. And I've said that it was their fantasies that tied them together because, you see, Louis Darquier called himself a baron but Myrtle's first husband, who was a Gilbert and Sullivan singer, who was the son of working class singers from respectively Bootle in Lancashire and Belfast in Northern Ireland, when they married, Myrtle called him Lord Workman Macnaughten, whereas his real name was Lord - (laughs) - was Roy Workman. He wasn't a lord at all. Do you see the level of fantasy we're dealing with?

MAXINE McKEW: Let's go back to the character of Louis, because he's equally bizarre and complex. What do you make of his particular brand of anti-Semitism? Was it a pose for the times, or was it deep-seated?

CARMEN CALLIL: With Louis himself, it was not deep-seated. He took it up as a profession because it bought him money. When he took up anti-Semitism, he had been convicted of fraud, he'd been out of work for 10 years, supported by his younger brother and also by the Tasmanian family, who were extremely generous always to their sister and daughter Myrtle. But he never earned a cent in his life, really, until he became a commissioner. He was always borrowing money and their bar bills are enormous. At one point in the early 1940s, there's as much as £50,000 in one bar alone in Paris. He did it for the money, because the Nazis paid him from 1936 onwards to become a professional anti-Semite. But the men he mixed with in Paris were fascists and extremists and nationalists. So he had plenty of comrades who were sincere French anti-Semites. And perhaps he felt he was one, but basically I think my book demonstrates he did it for the money.

MAXINE McKEW: Equally though, as you say, he was in the pay of the Germans from the 1930s on and yet once again the patriot in him comes out because he signs up and he fights for France and he ends up as a prisoner of the Germans in Poland, doesn't he?

CARMEN CALLIL: Yes, he advised another French anti-Semite who was looking to find money from the same sources as Louis in the late 1930s, just before Munich, and he advised them, "Take money from anyone who will give it to you, but keep to what you think yourself are your own principles." He was a French nationalist and national socialist. He used to say in the years in Madrid, "I was not a Nazi, I was a French national socialist."

MAXINE McKEW: And how do you see his real value to the Germans in that period from 1940 to 42?

CARMEN CALLIL: I think he drove them absolutely mad, and I think if you wanted to do a comic opera of how the Germans managed badly in France, doing a trajectory of Louis's attempts to please them and his utter failure to do so would be a good basis for a fabulous movie. He failed entirely to help them. He made everything much worse, because he was always starting new organisations from which he extracted money, which would never do anything with the money he was given. He pocketed all the money himself. Hardly a leaflet was produced.

MAXINE McKEW: And let's go to the period then when Paris is liberated and of course, you know, a lot of rough justice was meted out to the collaborators and many others, but of course, Louis escapes this. How and why?

CARMEN CALLIL: Well, Louis was holed up with Myrtle in the Hotel Bristol where the Germans put their senior people and their officers. And his death was announced on the radio because someone with a monocle - because Louis Darquier always wore a monocle - had been shot, and they thought it was him. Anyway, he knew that they were after him. And when Myrtle heard that people were coming - this is the account I've been told and read - she shoved him out the back door when she heard a knock at the door. And his younger brother, unwisely but out of family loyalty - who was a good man, his younger brother - got him into a motor car, took him back to the family flat and holed him upstairs in an apartment where the family lived. And Anatole de Monzie, another French Republican collaborator who had great connections in Spain, as did Louis, got him over the frontier. He got his documents very easily because he had collaborated with Franco and Franco's men throughout his years in Paris and in France during the war.

MAXINE McKEW: Let's now relate all this back to where it started for you, I suppose - your friend and therapist Anne Darquier, Louis and Myrtle's daughter. When she later found out the full history, do you think this is I suppose what became for her a history that she couldn't simply end up living with?

CARMEN CALLIL: She couldn't end up living with it. And something I didn't write in my book because I wasn't - I don't have the facts for it, but three days before she died I saw her and she was in a most appalling state. She couldn't stop crying. And I knew she had just flown back from seeing her family because I knew she hated her family. And I think she went to see Louis after she had learned about the death of her mother, the death of Myrtle, and I think it was too much for her. I think her parents were the death of her. It's easy to blame Louis most, but I'm not so sure. Myrtle had a very favoured childhood and I think her motherhood of Anne is something that Anne never came to terms with, that she never had a mother, and when she met Myrtle, she said she was absolutely destroyed by drink and drugs.

MAXINE McKEW: So it's a tale of shattered lives all round?

CARMEN CALLIL: Absolutely shattered lives. I think I feel a bit shattered as I sit here because it never occurred to me that the Tasmanian Joneses wouldn't speak to me because they denied what he had done. I thought they knew what he had done and were ashamed. That's what I am finding rather shattering.

MAXINE McKEW: Just one final point before you go, this period of French history - to reread it and I suppose the detail into which you've gone - the great divide, of course, between the collaborators on the one side and the resistance fighters on the others. To what extent do you feel there was a tremendous hangover of all of this that infected post-war politics, particularly in the period after the war but perhaps still up until this day?

CARMEN CALLIL: I don't think up until this day, no, is the case. Certainly after the war, de Gaulle had to invent a myth of massive resistance to the German occupier to unite a very, very divided country which has been divided in a way since the French revolution. But since the 1970s, the French have faced up to what they did in Vichy and they know perfectly well what happened. What they haven't faced up to, I would say, is men like Louis Darquier. The French still suffer I'd say from intellectual grandeur, far too great a respect for intellectual grandeur - and for intellectuals, to come to that - and Louis Darquier doesn't fit into their image as what they like to present as French culture. I think that's a problem. As the problems that face France now, though, those are much the same as the ones that face Great Britain, which is also a divided country, and it's much to do with immigration, asylum seekers, the Iraq war - all sorts of things like that. But I think the inheritance of the war in France has passed.

MAXINE McKEW: Alright. Carmen Callil, for that detail tonight, thank you very much for joining us.